


Sam + the Machine

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Season/Series 02, Season/Series 03, Stanford Era (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:53:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25869979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Sam grew up on a steady diet of classic rock. Blue Oyster Cult, Alice in Chains, Bon Jovi. The soundtrack of his childhood was noisy and syncopated. He’s always fallen asleep best to a steady drum track, the vibration of the road humming below him.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester
Comments: 7
Kudos: 34





	Sam + the Machine

**Author's Note:**

> Why am I so preoccupied with preseries Winchesters and Sam’s time at Stanford? I could take some guesses, but mostly I have no idea. Neither Florence + the Machine nor YouTube existed in 2001, but I hope you’ll forgive me for massaging the timeline a little.

Sam grew up on a steady diet of classic rock. Blue Oyster Cult, Alice in Chains, Bon Jovi. The soundtrack of his childhood was noisy and syncopated. He’s always fallen asleep best to a steady drum track, the vibration of the road humming below him.

That was music as he knew it. The bubblegum pop tracks drifting through shopping malls, playing softly in the background of grocery stores—it was something that belonged to another place, to people who had never clutched a knife in their hands, fingers flexing around the handle to the frantic beating of their heart.

He loves his brother. He loves their car. Most days, under the resentment brewing a decade in the making, he even loves his dad. None of it is enough to keep him there. He grows up. He takes the knife and cuts himself free. He leaves.

Sam goes to college, and he finds other things to love.

First, he finds life. Plain, simple, ordinary life. Life with burnt-grounds coffee at the student cafe, with brand new textbooks cracking stiff and crisp in his hands, with a bed that doesn’t move, doesn’t rumble like the Chevy. A bed that’s the same, day in and day out. He finds a girl. Then he finds her music.

The music Jess likes is gentle. It’s all soft acoustic guitars and folksy, harmonizing voices. It’s nice enough, in its way. Sam likes it in the same way he likes everything about Jess. He likes that it’s easy, uncomplicated. It’s sunny, like her hair. Like her.

Most of all, Sam likes that she wants to share it with him. It’s an open secret—something she loves, and he’s invited inside. He walks through the door and pulls the walls of her heart around him.

*

Not all of her music is gentle.

It’s something he discovers gradually. He’s not sure if her tastes change or if they change together. He’s in her apartment one night, where he spends more and more of his time. Jess is in the kitchen, puttering around and putting a kettle on while Sam settles on her couch (thrifted, smelling vaguely of mothballs, _home)._ Cinnamon candles give off a heavy, spicy scent, and something plays in the background, something with a driving drumbeat and a woman’s voice singing overtop of it in a piercing falsetto.

“What is this?” Sam calls to the kitchen.

“What’s what?” Jess calls back.

“The music,” Sam says, but he’s already on his feet, tilting the screen of her iPod where it’s plugged into the laptop, the better to see it. _Strangeness and Charm,_ the little face reads.

“Florence and the Machine,” Jess says, still wiping her wet fingers on her denim skirt as she climbs onto the couch. She props her head on her fist, elbow hitched over the back of the sofa. Curly strands of hair spill like water down the side of her face. “I just heard it for the first time the other day. Why? D’you like it?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, folding himself down on the couch and kissing her. Her hair makes a curtain around them, sweet-smelling and soft. He kisses her again. “I think I do.”

*

Things are good. For the first time in a long time, things are really, actually good. He excels in school. He makes friends. Brady invites him to an honest to God Thanksgiving with his family in Crescent Park. Someone says grace, and everyone smiles when Mr. Johnson carves the turkey. They sip wine from sensible glasses, and Brady’s mom asks about his studies. They all seem impressed that he’s going into law.

Things are good—except when they’re not. The phone doesn’t ring, not even on holidays. For a while, Sam thinks that it might. He imagines the conversations he might have with his family—with Dean, at least. He wants to hear about the hunts they’ve been on, maybe consult the library when they’re stumped by lore. Stanford boasts a huge special collection, rare maps and manuscripts, out-of-print books and archives stuffed full. It’s right across from the Crown Library where Sam spends most of his time poring over law books rather than books of Greek mythology, for once.

He finds himself in the Green Library sometimes, finds himself running fingers over the spines of books that have nothing to do with him, with titles like _Trolldómr in Early Medieval Scandinavia_ and _Hypostasis of the Archons._ He knows there’s a religious studies specialist who works out of the East Asia Library—knows his name is John Ferreira, knows exactly how he’d pitch a bid for information, if he needed to. There are so many things Sam knows that barely matter anymore.

He thought that Dean would call.

He doesn’t know why he thinks it—he knows exactly why Dean doesn’t call, knows well enough to know it’s stupid to expect anything different, but. Well. He still thought he might be proved wrong.

Dean’s been there, closer than his own shadow, forever pressed up against Sam’s back his entire life, whether Sam wanted it or not (and sometimes, in those last years, it had been _not_ as often as it’d been anything else).

It’s the speed of the thing that’s so disjointing, Sam thinks in his private moments. When he’s alone in his bed, his roommate off somewhere, who knows. When he’s worrying it like a tooth, the shape of the absence Dean left behind—Sam thinks it’s the suddenness that stung the most. The sense of something being ripped away with a quickness that leaves him reeling.

It hits him at night, when he’s lying in the dark and sleep won’t come. He lies flat on his back, alternately staring up at the ceiling and the skin on the inside of his eyelids. The room is too quiet, which means his breath is too loud. Everyone is home for the holidays, so he doesn’t even have distant shouts and dim music thumping through the walls to keep him company.

Jess is at home with her parents in Marin. It’s a little nothing drive, an hour and a half tops. Sam could be there before midnight—but she’s spending time with her family. Her nice, normal family, and she doesn’t need him popping in like a stray. He doesn’t even have a car.

It’s not like he needs one. It’s easy enough to get around—anything worth getting to can be reached on foot, and he’s even got a bike now. He’d found it at a flea market, $40 in mint condition, and all he’d had to do was change a flat. It’s a road bike, a fixie, impractical for any hint of rugged terrain but perfect for NorCal streets. Dean would give him endless amounts of shit if he ever saw it.

_Dean._

The thought of him hits Sam like a pain.

He doesn’t need a car, but he feels naked without one—without the ability to take off at a moment’s notice. He loves the feeling of his ever-growing roots—he mostly does—but tonight they feel more like anchors. He feels like a bird with rudely clipped wings, wounded and alone.

The room is much too quiet. He already knows he won’t get any sleep tonight.

Sam pushes himself up on an elbow, tired and drawn. The chill of the night radiates through the window, despite the insulation. He’s cold at his cheeks and hands, everywhere his Stanford hoodie and mussed blankets don’t touch. He sits all the way up and shoves a hand through his hair.

He doesn’t turn on a light. He doesn’t need to, really. It never gets dark here, not truly dark. Not crypt-dark or graveyard-dark. Ghostly phosphorescent light creeps through the window, a tribute from the tall lamps that light the path beyond the walls of this room. The moon is fat and gibbous, pouring bright moonlight into his eyes through the slats in the blinds.

Sam pads across the floor barefoot, the cold, bare tile stinging his toes. He flips his laptop open in the dark, momentarily blinded by its light. He pulls up the internet browser, types in YouTube. He squints against the over-bright screen and rattles off the first name that comes to mind in the search bar. He clicks the first video he sees.

Haunting whistles and halting piano notes fill the room, and Sam sinks back onto his bed, sitting at its edge with his head bowed like he’s just undertaken a herculean effort. He feels more tired now, but nowhere near sleep. He feels wrung out.

Florence Welch’s plaintive wailing fills the room, singing of a love that leaves her gasping. _And my running feet could fly. Each breath screaming, ‘we are all too young to die.’_

Sam lowers himself back onto the stiff mattress, his knees pulled up in the dark. 

The off-white plaster of the ceiling starts to blur and bend. Tears well up like groundwater, unbidden. Sam feels a dim urge to dash them away, but his limbs feel heavy. His heart feels heavy. He lies on his back and feels himself sinking into the nap of the comforter all around him. He spreads his fingers slightly to feel the drag of cotton beneath them.

He closes his eyes and lets himself drift.

_Now all the days of begging, the days of theft, no more gasping for a breath._

Dean would call him Samantha, probably. Would call him a fucking girl for crying into his pillow listening to Jess’s music. Well, fuck it. Dean’s not here.

Dean. Home. Love and loss. Sam wonders where Dean is tonight, wonders what he’s doing. He nestles himself deeper into his hoodie, the scent of his own body and warmth thick around him. He feels very, very sorry for himself and doesn’t even try to hide it. Florence knows what he feels like. She gets it. The music gets him.

_I pray to god this breath will last. It pushes past my lips. I gasp._

*

It’s 2007. It’s Tuesday. They’re in another shady motel, some pay-by-the-hour place. Next door, a headboard thumps against the wall, a counterpoint to the rhythmic _squeak squeak squeak_ of a flimsy bed frame.

“Porn star chic,” Dean pronounces the room.

Sam shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “You would know.”

Dean flashes a sharp-toothed grin and tosses his bag on the nearest bed, making a beeline for the bathroom to unload the soda he’d had along the way. Sam sighs, eyes to the heavens, and counts the stains on the ceiling.

There are only two reasons they ever bother to stop in a town: following a lead and running out of gas. They’re here for the latter, one too many days in the car, butts gone numb and backs gone stiff from inactivity. For the better part of the year, they can catch some Z’s outside if they need to. Now it’s getting cold, and if Sam has to spend another night in that too-small space, knees bent and cramped to make his legs fit, he might actually kill someone.

They get at each other’s throats when they go too long between cases. They’re volatile on their very best days, and the crackling blend of unspent energy and petty friction doesn’t do them any favors. It’s good to have space, Sam thinks, staking a claim on his own bed and falling back on it with a huff. Even space as small as this—two feet between two beds, such as it is.

He doesn’t imagine he’ll fall asleep. He’s that particular brand of sleepless tired that sneaks up when his body hasn’t earned its rest—but the sound of the shower running in the next room is soothing on a prerational level, like the hum of the Impala beneath him, like Dean singing softly beside.

He falls asleep, and when he wakes up, it’s night.

Sam blinks in the dark, disoriented. The red letters of the digital clock read 10:39. He’s surprised Dean didn’t wake him.

Dean sleeps on in the next bed over, snoring lightly. Sam thinks of turning on the bathroom light to get his bearings, dismissing the idea just as quickly. Dean hasn’t been sleeping any better than he has—worse, probably. Their father’s death had hit them both in equal but oppositely hard ways. Dean doesn’t talk about it—sits on his feelings like he’s his own goddamn Fort Knox—but Sam is fluent in Dean. It was his first language. He learned it before he learned English, learned it at his father’s knee.

Dean needs his sleep, so Sam feels his way through the dark, mapping the way with his toes on carpet tacky with years of grime. He’s glad of the lack of light, tries not to think too hard about what his bare feet are touching. He feels his way over to the little desk and flips open the laptop, turning the brightness down and angling it so its pale blue light doesn’t touch Dean where he rests.

Dean sleeps on, oblivious.

Sam scans local news websites, looking for strange occurrences. Even in the towns where they wind up on accident, there’s sometimes something going on. Evil doesn’t rest. Neither does hungry, and there’s plenty of both out there. Small town America is weirder than most people could dream.

He loses an hour clicking through various websites. There’s a lot of sad, plenty of tragedy to stuff him up full, but none of it their kind of tragedy. An elderly woman disappeared two weeks ago—might be something, might be dementia. A young mother killed herself in the bath. Sam sighs and runs a hand through his hair, blinking eyes that feel gritty and tired. He leaves the window open and closes the laptop—might be a lead. He’ll mention it to Dean in the morning.

The dark is more complete after staring at a glowing screen. He’s truly blind now, the room nothing but pitch black. Sam pushes his chair back quietly, lifting it up when he moves so it doesn’t make a sound as it scrapes across the thin carpet.

He makes a split second decision, finding his way to Dean’s bed in the dark, finding it through the sound of his breathing alone. He pulls back the covers—it’s a testament to how well they know each other that Dean doesn’t go for the gun beneath his pillow.

Dean makes a sleepy sound, something that might be _wha—?_ with just a little more intention behind it. As it is, it’s nothing but a breath. Sam taps Dean on the shoulder, the universal sign for _move over,_ and Dean does, his body responding to Sam even in slumber.

Sam crawls into Dean’s bed without making a sound. It’s warm beneath the sheets. He’s instantly surrounded by the smell of home, of Dean all around him. He burrows his face beneath the comforter and drifts off into sleep.

*

Sam wakes alone. Strong morning sunlight pours through the curtains, pulled open sometime while he was out. The nutty smell of coffee pervades the room, and Sam turns toward it, blind.

“Nngh.”

“Up and at ‘em, Sammy,” Dean says, annoyingly chipper. Annoyingly _awake._

Dean tosses a paper packet at him, and it bounces off Sam’s chest and onto the bed. Sam ignores it. He knuckles at his eyes and nearly cracks his jaw on a yawn.

“What time is it?”

“After ten, sleeping beauty. Hurry up, places to go, people to see. Look, I even got you breakfast.”

A glazed donut, sticky even through the wrapper. Sam grunts. He spies a paper cup of coffee on the nightstand and picks it up, taking a swig on his way to the bathroom. It’s burnt and hot, and it feels like heaven sliding down his parched throat.

He slams the bathroom door behind him without another word, only emerging when he’s clean and feeling significantly more human.

“C’mon,” Dean says, impatient but not angry, tapping out the bass line to “Don’t Fear The Reaper” on his thigh. If he were a kid, he’d be rocking on his heels. “Daylight’s burning.”

*

Turns out Dean had found Sam’s tentative attempts at research while he was out. In addition to swinging by the nearest gas station for fuel—sugar, caffeine, and gasoline—he’d also done some preliminary legwork. Prudence Mills had disappeared from Royal Springs Assisted Living Facility—the locked memory care ward.

“So no chance she wandered off?”

“Not unless grandma’s a crack lockpick with hacking skills. Security cameras didn’t pick up a thing, and the alarm never sounded. The evening nurse did a wellness check when Mrs. Mills never showed up for dinner, and she was gone.”

“Huh. Did you get a chance to interview the nurse?”

Dean shakes his head. “Her shift starts at four. Figure we’ve still got some time to kill before then. Might as well talk to the family.”

Sam nods. Dean’s in a good mood. He can see it in the way Dean taps along to the sound of the stereo. AC/DC pumps through the speakers, turned up loud with the windows down and no regard for the quiet houses on the staid residential streets they roll through. As if hearing his thoughts, Dean reaches over and turns it up.

Somewhere, people are dying, always. They roll toward danger or they roll toward salvation, and Sam tips his head back to catch the morning sun.

*

Sam doesn’t listen to music after Dean goes to hell—couldn’t stand it, in fact—but there’s this whole swath of time before. There’s this time before where he listens as often as he can. He buys a cheap mp3 player in a Walmart in one of the towns they pass through. Its name starts with a Y or a W. It doesn't really matter. He loads it up with songs that Dean knows nothing about.

He doesn’t go for runs in those days—he hasn’t yet found anything to run from, nothing to run towards—but he listens whenever he’s alone. When Dean’s in the shower, singing loud and off-key in a way that makes Sam’s heart clench. When he’s paging through books that never have quite what he needs in another small town library. When he’s hunched against the window, bone-weary and unable to grasp at sleep, although he’ll pretend at it for as long as he can, just so he doesn’t have to see Dean’s face silhouetted by street lamps.

He fills himself up in anticipation of the day he’ll be punctured and drained dry. There’s an emptiness coming for him, a hole ripped right out of the center of his world, the center of his heart. He doesn’t really believe it’ll ever come, but then—he does, doesn’t he?

He could reach out and touch. He could hold onto Dean while he’s got him, like every stroke of hand to flank, lips to skin, fingers to face is an acknowledgment of everything he’s got to lose. But that would be an admission of something. He can’t deal with a last time without wanting to be violently ill, so he clenches his fingers tight. He twists them in knots in the pit of his lap, working the thin skin raw, and he doesn’t touch at all.

Dean looks askance at him sometimes. Looks at him wounded when he thinks Sam’s not looking. Dean thinks he gets it, which means of course, he doesn’t. Sam watches him draw all the wrong conclusions and never, ever opens his mouth to correct him. There are some things they just don’t do, and talking is one of them.

*

“What’re you listening to?” Dean asks one day.

“What?”

“Your—you know.” He makes an impatient gesture. “Never thought you were one for music. Now you’ve always got your head buried in that thing.”

A few feelings hit simultaneously. Annoyance is primary among them, a certain little-brother instinct that’s never completely gone away—he’s six and angry to tears that Dean ate the last bite of his pie; he’s fifteen and snapping at everything because he can’t have just one, just _one_ scrap of privacy. He’s flattered that Dean noticed at all, warmed through in a private, down-deep part of his heart. He’s three seconds from heartwreckingly devastated.

“Nothing,” he says, clenching his fist a little tighter around cheap Taiwanese plastic. The faux finish of plastic silver is beginning to flake off.

Dean stares at him a while longer, half-lidded eyes studying Sam’s face. He shrugs. “Whatever, man.”

He gets a beer out of the fridge. He gets one for Sam too, and that’s how Sam knows they’re still okay. He rolls up the mp3 player in flimsy earbuds. He shoves it to the bottom of his pack. They talk about the case, talk about Bobby, talk about the waitress in that diner three states back. They don’t talk about hell. They don’t talk about Dad. They don’t talk about them.

*

It’s been 51 weeks and three days since Dean bought Sam’s life back from darkness. 51 weeks and three days of denial, of cases, of talking and not talking, of spinning their fucking wheels to find their way here. They still don’t have Lilith. Dean’s still going to hell.

Sam thinks he’ll get off—not _unscathed,_ not that; not ever—but he thinks he’ll get out of this without losing a limb. Without having to say goodbye. Without that last time he just knows is going to kill him.

Who was he kidding? This was always going to make him bleed.

It’s been 51 weeks of barely touching. 51 weeks of keeping to his own bed, of dressing in the bathroom and avoiding even lingering glances. He looks at Dean in hungry spurts, in greedy glances that feel like he’s stealing something out of the maw of death. Like it’s too bright to look at him any other way.

Now he just looks. He looks and looks like he needs to get enough to last him forever. _Last_ is coming for them, like it or not. He rages against it, but resignation is settling down heavy in his bones. This is it, it says. Last chance.

He thought. For 51 weeks, he thought. Now it just looks like so much wasted time. Life has always seemed clearer in the rearview.

He gets so close. He finally touches.

Sam’s fingers land on Dean like a dying dog jumping for a scrap of meat. This is ferocity and fury. This is a dying breath. He pours himself all over Dean, and Dean opens up to it. To him. With a loud groan and a hotwet mouth, with a tongue sliding along Sam’s, slick as hell. He gets his hands in Sam’s hair and groans _Sammy_ like all he was waiting for was permission.

“Fuck.”

“Want you.”

“Let me—c’mon, fuckin’—”

This is going to kill him, it is. This is going to fucking bury him when Dean’s gone, and he will be gone. But for now Dean is solid beneath him, strong thighs radiating warmth beneath Sam’s rocking hips, strong hands getting a good grip on his ass, kneading it open and pulling him in.

Fuck it, Sam thinks. He never figured he’d live a long life anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> _Atom to atom, what’s the matter with me, love?_
> 
> [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture)


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